


A Canker in a Hedge

by vaingloriousactor



Category: Assassins - Sondheim/Weidman
Genre: American History, Assassination, Assassins, GIANT WARNING FOR AWFUL PEOPLE, Gen, I LIKE THE MUSICAL PLEASE DON'T YELL AT ME, I really wanted to explore a friendship between these two ok, Male-Female Friendship, Musicals, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Terrible People, Y'ALL I KNOW THESE PEOPLE ARE TERRIBLE I ACCEPT THAT I'M GOING TO BURN IN THE PITS OF HADES, shitty historical figures, so er, they're literally assassins, this was actually super researched, yeah i researched and wrote a fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 15:10:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10993455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaingloriousactor/pseuds/vaingloriousactor
Summary: Booth and Fromme develop an unexpected friendship explored through snapshots of the former's memories of life.Literally everyone in this fic existed. Try me.





	A Canker in a Hedge

**Author's Note:**

> HI EVERYONE. Let's get this out of the way.  
> I really like the musical "Assassins." THAT SAID, I am not here to condone or support any of the actions of these individuals. This is probably about as tasteless and classless as fanfiction can get so here I am. I was mostly just interested in the interaction of two people who don't really speak at all during the show, so here we are.  
> Also, virtually everything from Booth's life that I write comes from the myriad of biographies I have. Because I go hard with research and also I'm an American history buff. Edwin and Asia had the conversations they have. That was a direct quote of the fortune he was told as a boy. Isabella was, in fact, a huge supporter of the local synagogue, one likely attended by Junius. And Booth ADORED her tiny daughter Mary Bella and viewed her as something of a daughter. He probably did not kiss David Herold. I added that myself. But he was favored by men and women alike.  
> Now that I've made it painfully clear I hyper-research, please enjoy.

 He’s used to the scent of her body lotion at this point.  It’s not always unwelcome either. She reminds him of his sister, reminds him of the time he ran to Asia half-manic and declared

 “ _The hell you think you’re doing chasing after a man like that?” And Asia only looked at him and sighed and said,_

_“Johnnie you don’t understand,” as she took his hands and ran her thumbs along the surface before interlacing their fingers (she always said he had such perfect hands).  But Asia was quiet and reserved and long dead and hopefully in heaven away from him and while rumors debated whether or not they shared a grave, they were apart._

But the woman cries softly into his chest and he doesn’t dare disturb her, running his fingers, each wrapped with a ring with a different stone, through her hair, brittle and straw-like.

“Do you not have any other confidant willing to listen to your sobs?” She pulls back and stares at him, holding back an answer at first.

“I don’t think so.” She rubs her nose and studies him.  She is alive and Asia is dead.  There is a part of her somewhere in the world that’s recuperating and rehabilitating and a sliver of her, one frozen forever in time, standing here before him.  Asia is nowhere. Not even a sliver of Asia is here. But Lynette is for now and he wonders what is going to happen when Lynette, the actual Lynette, not the ghost of her deed, passes on. Would she disappear too?  He didn’t like the thought of it.  Most of them were dead. The others weren’t so lucky. Every April, for one night only, blood pulsed from his throat as Milton prophesied of all demons. Not that he was a demon. And every year when that day came around, she’d stare and sigh as he tried to go about business as usual.

“Do you need help, Johnnie?” She’d ask and he’d swear he heard Asia’s voice.

 “Lynette, I am all too capable of tending myself.” His voice would be level and she’d arch her brows and raise her hands in defense as he made a deliberate effort not to look at the blood, however spectral it might be. He always was such a hemophobe. “And do not call me Johnnie. That is a name reserved only for friends.”

He was fond of her presence though he’d never admit to it out loud.  She was an all too familiar shadow who flitted about beside him, chattering away in a sing song voice about her dearly beloved, her—

“Christ, can you not mention him? One day. That is all I implore of you. One day without mentioning him.”

It only happened once and it was a good day.

But usually she weeps and somewhere in his heart he wants to protect her.

 “Asia, please.” He begs once, his voice low and she pulls back, brows arched.

“Asia?”

“It is of no consequence to you. A slip of the tongue.”

She makes a note to channel the part of herself that still lives, the part on parole in New York, to look into the name Asia in regards to the name John Wilkes Booth.

A sister.  He had a sister.

Things changed after that.  She saw in him a newfound tenderness.  Sometimes she noticed he even smiled at her, the ends of his dark mustache curling up ever so slightly.  Somehow he seemed more like a …person, one capable of sympathy.  And so she not only cried into his vest.  She started speaking more too.  Told him about the Family, about Linda who confided all to the police.  About Sandra who encouraged her bad habits.  And then one day, he told her about Asia.

And she understood.

****

_“Let me see him.”_

_“Asia, no.”_

_“Edwin, I said let me see him.” Her hair is uncombed, strands free from their pins as she seizes the long-haired man by his shoulders._

_“You must not think of him. I implore you.” His voice is calm, too calm. “You’re hysterical, Asia.”_

_“He is dead!”_

_“So is the president!”_

_“You loved him once, Edwin! I remember how you’d smile at the sight of him!”_

_“He is our brother no more. And this man here never was.”_

_She strikes him across the cheek, the echoing slap summoning her husband. She breaks through the crowd, falling to her knees, choked sobs breaking free as she crouches by the discarded corpse._

_“Is this your brother, Ma’am? Mrs Clarke, is it?”_

_She takes the hand, pallid and clammy, free of rings, and she slides the sleeve back, revealing his pulseless wrist, turning his hand over, running two fingers over the letters scrawled in faded India ink._

_J.W.B._

_“This is he and I am she.”_

_She raises her gaze to meet those of the officer and the coroner._

_The tears have ceased but Edwin pulls her away again, his eyes dark, unfeeling._

_The man, the proprietor, leads him, John, away from the scene, and while he struggles, the man, the hell-being is stronger. As if with a snap of the fingers, the proprietor leads him elsewhere, to another grim sight for him to endre. A large woman draped in black crepe, in the throes of middle age and mourning, is staring straight-ahead at the camera, frozen in so much more than sorrow. John thinks she can see him (he would see a parallel image at another point. A pastel-clad woman screaming while being dragged down in a moving car). When his gaze drifts to the space behind her, the stoic visage of his victim peers back._

_He screams. He wants to go back to Asia. Even to Edwin._

_And then he’s in that carnivalesque purgatory once more._

_“You see, they’re talking about you, thinking about you.  You have had an impact on all of them.”_

_****_

 

_“You made an impact.” He crouches beside the woman who looks up at him from behind bangs._

_“Fuck you.” She spits but she crouches back and wraps her bony arms around her legs. “The hell do you know about making an impact?”_

_He laughs languidly and crouches beside her._

_“Oh I know many things.”_

 

_Therein is the lie._

****

“Do you want to explore?”

“No, Lynette.”

“How about we bother John? The other one, obviously.”

He doesn’t know where she got cotton candy but she’s eating it with a feigned daintiness. He makes a mental note to tell the proprietor that providing certain members of their community with concentrated sugar was bound to be disastrous.

“I am tending my own matters, Lynette.”

“Really? Looks like you’re just sitting there.”

“I am deep in contemplation then.”

“For the guy who walks around convincing people to shoot people, you spend an awful lot of time reflecting on your life. Life life that is.”

He sighed and looks at her, rubbing his temples slightly, rising in mock surrender and walking toward her. She only grins, pleased with herself.

****

 

“You ever love someone? You don’t talk too much about anyone but your siblings. Funny because they sure don’t talk about you. Did anyone ever love you? You don’t strike me as a good lover.”

She had gotten cotton candy again, trodding along the earthen ground of purgatory, kicking up dust as she went.  He looks at her with an arched brow.

“Who are you to ask of these matters? You truly are not one to speak of romance.”

She scoffs then shrugs.

“It could do some good to see you more as human, I think.  No one has ever really spoken of your actual life.  Not when I was in school at least. Only the bare facts.” She allowed a feigned deadpan expression to cross her face before her lips curled up again.

****

_The proprietor had yanked him through time to the immediate aftermath of his own death.  He pulled John to the front of the scaffolds where Davey and the others were lined up, bags on their heads, wrists and ankles tied.  The man in the suspenders, sinister and clown-like, pointed._

_“There’s your man, Johnnie boy. Now don’t take your eyes off of him.” He chuckled. “And there is your little friend. The pretty one. What was his name? Lewis Powell, that was it. Young and impressionable wasn’t he? Looked up to you and Davey with all he had. And he listened to you too.”_

_John wanted to avert his eyes. He had done this._

 

_****_

“Did you have kids? I didn’t have kids. Don’t have kids. Somewhere out there, most of me is alive.” She points to the space above them, then below, and then somewhere to the side. “Wherever that somewhere is. Isn’t that weird? That there are two of me? Me me and me here. Or maybe I’m me me and the me that’s properly alive is some shell of me.”

She rambles and he only half listens.  Some of them are dead.  Most of them, really. There is currently only one of him. He is pure spirit. Pure tortured, damned soul, if that was the proper word. “Right or wrong, God judge me,” he had written. And judged he was.  The religion of his father he had so shunned did not believe in a Hell, much less a limbo space. And yet here he was. Dead. Actually dead and actually damned.  He had a grave and he knew people placed pennies on it if just to make him squirm.  It did for a while.

“No, I have no legacy of my own. My siblings begot children who begot children. And none speak of me.”

****

_Mary Bella runs up to him as fast as her little legs could carry her and he laughs scooping her up in one arm. She squeals, her dark curls bouncing._

_“Are you here for tea?”_

_“I’m here to see your mama, but tea can be arranged, I think.” He looks at Isabella on the steps of synagogue she donated so fervently to who rolls her eyes but smiles._

_“Are you here to spoil my daughter, Johnnie?” He laughs and places the little girl on the ground._

_“In truth I am here to ask you for assistance in prying another actress off my coattails but I might just have been coerced into tea.”_

_Isabella drafted a letter for the actress while John had sipped at imaginary tea. And before he left he gave the little girl a ring._

_“When I am famous you can tell people I gave this to you.”_

_Engraved in the silver was the word “Regard.”_

_And when he was infamous and as Mary Bella grew older she defended him, for he was the closest thing to a father she had known._

****

 

“You’re thinking again, aren’t you?” The voice brought him back to reality (if their plane of being, or rather lack of being, could be considered reality), a voice, he realized, that was decidedly not squeaky but, instead, one always on the verge of breaking, laced with sympathy, concern, and, to his own surprise, fondness.

“Yes, Lynette.”

“Why do you call me that, Johnnie? No one calls me that.”

“Because it is your name.”

She tiptoes closer to him and balances on the edge of his bed like a quiet, affectionate, and sincere puppy.

“Can I sleep in here? Please?” Her eyes are pleading and for a moment he sees a woman who had been so manipulated and warped by all too seductive demons and he nods, slowly, contemplatively.  

“Yes, you may.”

 

His bed smells like her lotion. He does not mind because for the first time since he was alive, he thinks he has a friend.

**Author's Note:**

> Have I ever mentioned how much I hate punctuation formatting on this site? My apologies.  
> Also the Fortune Teller's blurb is a direct quote. Pretty cool huh.  
> He also actually wrote "Right or Wrong God judge me."  
> Now you know things
> 
> Bibliography:  
> Alford, Terry 'Fortune's Fool'  
> The Writings of John Wilkes Booth  
> Bugliosi, Vincent and Curt Gentry. "Helter Skelter"


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